When Will They Put Kamala In The Barrel?

Created
Thu, 01/08/2024 - 03:30
Updated
Thu, 01/08/2024 - 03:30
So when is the media going to turn on Harris? I don’t know but I’d guess it’s going to happen pretty soon. It’s inevitable for all the reasons Brian Beutler spelled out in his excellent piece today in Off Message: As happily as it ended for liberals, the early weeks of July were their darkest since November 2016, illuminating only how various elites will respond if Donald Trump wins the election.  What we saw was disturbing: When it appeared that Trump would win the election all but unopposed, we did not see officeholders take steps to batten down the hatches of the political system, or media figures apply extra scrutiny to the presumptive president. (In 2016, media elites explained away their insipid obsession with Hillary Clinton’s emails by citing her poll numbers—she would likely be president, after all, and thus merited a thorough scrubbing.) Instead, we witnessed what the scholar Timothy Snyder has famously described as “obeying in advance.” Some of these gestures were truly ominous. Trump threatened to imprison Mark Zuckerberg if elected, and the Facebook founder responded by lifting post-January 6 restrictions on his accounts. When Trump was injured in an assassination attempt, he refused to allow the medical professionals who treated him to brief the media or release his physician notes, but reporters and law enforcement officials didn’t respond by applying their usual rigorous standards, and instead, fearful of antagonizing him, just swallowed his self-serving version of events whole.  But a lot of it looked more like fawning than…